Although it has taken a while for the relationship to bear fruit, I'm beginning to believe that one of HP's most strategic assets is the EPIC co-inventor relationship it forged with Intel back in the mid-90s. EPIC, which stands for Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, is a technology that serves as the foundation for Intel's 64-bit family of processors (IA-64).

So far, two editions of IA-64 have shipped: Itanium and Itanium 2. There are more to come. Back when HP and Intel forged the agreement, both companies believed that the foundations under their current lines of processors (RISC and CISC, respectively), were on close to running out of gas. HP is very slowly migrating its surviving operating systems (HP-UX, NSK, and OpenVMS) to IA-64 and phasing out their support for its RISC-based PA-RISC processor as well as Intel's Alpha processors.

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